Android - is it worth it?

Unity Engine
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1

On one hand it seems like a great opportunity to simply ship to one more platform, but articles like this one sort of make me doubt that I could recoup the investment of EUR 1200 that easily: Larva Labs (#5 Top Grossing App on Android Market makes about $60/day?)
And even less so since I can’t easily port what I already have due to Unity3 physics being different from what they were like in Unity iPhone 1.7 (new version of PhysX…)

Any thoughts? Does anyone know any positive stories about the Android Market? Yeah, the potential might be there for the Android Market to be huge, but as far as I can tell right now, that’s about it, right?

2

Personally? At this moment? I highly doubt it. But i dont have numbers to back it up.

For me I cant sell my apps - at all - because the Google app store isnt open in Scandinavia. So no selling or buying paid apps.

On top - the QA needed for the diverse hardware platforms out there is immense. Extra costs right there.

Put on top, that Unity apps will only run on the very top+latest highend phones, and the market is simply too small - yet.

So I’m holding off, making games for iOS meanwhile and then later doing the easy port - if the market changes in my favour on Android.

Beware that this article is 1 year old - a lot of water has flown under the bridge since then. But I still could not sell my apps if the market was 100 times larger than iOS due to the country restriction. So who really cares.

/Thomas

3

Another complexity on the android is that large parts of its API is java which is not even supported for unity as it runs as native code through NDK. unsure what the api by now exposes and how hard if possible at all it is to bind in regular stuff (unsure if you could even bind against OF for android / admob)

4

This is why when I’m waiting for Unity 3 to finish my game (lies, like I have a choice haha), buy Unity Android after seeing how game sells on app store then port it over with Unity 3 easy porting system…

5

easy porting does not help on a mess of platform.

some higher end androids don’t support multitouch but have a “joystick” (joyball), others don’t have that but multitouch and others again have neither …

its only half as much joy as one might think.

6

Really, not all have multitouch? Thats sad to hear because its required for my game. Dont think it would be worth it to tailor it to the platform, unless the app is an amazing success on app store.

7

Unhappily no.

I think only Android devices released after the Droid or so have it … from what I recall not even the nexus one has a fully functional hardware multitouch support (someone with a device might correct me here)

8

It really depends on your game, I personally think that Android can get more out of your games in the future, with new devices like the Samsung Galaxy S you can already play wireless on your Samsung TV.
They also have a faster GPU then any other smartphone, so your games will probably look best on Android.

The market sales have already increased and are constantly on the rise, it is nowhere near the sales on the Appstore, but it can already be very rewarding. Android is also not bound on a single market, you could sell the game through your website, if you like, or you can use one of the many alternative app stores.

On Android market some free games have already passed the 1 million download barrier, 3D paid apps range usually between 1000-5000 downloads for the bad ones and up to 50000 for the good ones.

Overall sales for Android are good, but the big rush on Android devices will come with the next wave of devices, Android 2.2 is great and with devices like the Droid 2 and the Samsung Beam, that have it from the start and great specs, there will be a even heavier increase of Android owners in autumn and with that more sales.

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Free, nice, that will pay your mortgage. It’s extremely easy to block ad services on Android devices too, forget about earning ad revenues.

The no.1 paid Android game has 50,000+ lifetime sales as of May 2010.

There’s no one killer Android powered phone, the market is so fragmented. Multi-touch is not implemented in all devices, aspect ratios are extremely varied, the best selling and most reputable apps right now doesn’t run well in all devices, Google Checkout is not really conducive to impulse buys, etc. (I could go on and on and on).

Android phones are great for the consumer because of the variety of styles, price, etc. available for purchase.

As for the developer, if you want to spend hundreds of hours just testing your game on the top ten Android powered phones just to see if they run all right, be my guest. Me, I’ll stick with the Draconians called Apple, my kid’s college fund happens to agree with this.

10

I’m sadly in the (very large!) group of developers that can’t sell apps on Android. My strategy - keep developing on iPhone and as soon as Android market becomes available in my country, buy Unity Android and get porting!

I so want to jump on board with Android, but compared to the “completeness” of Apple’s solution, Android just feels like a beta by comparison.

11

Got any links to those numbers? I’m very interesting in following the market, but its hard without sources to the numbers being quoted various places.

Thanks

/Thomas

12

Outside the USA this holds for one single device only and thats the Galaxy S, which has the GPU the iPhone 4 and iPad should have had too if Apple would have used their brain and did basic fillrate math (the Galaxy S has the SGX 540, the intermediate step to the true big brother of the SGX535 in the iphone 3GS+, yet it has the fillrate that the iphone 4 and the ipad would have needed to not die on normal alpha usage).

Can sell through your website?
You are aware that the vast majorities of countries can neither buy nor sell applications on the android market place right? This includes ± 50% of the western europe, not “asia”.

So its nothing about can but must and at that point its worthless cause that model does not work out for smallscale devs on the desktop either. Without a seriously pushed Android Marketplace or a massively big and well known platform aside to it selling it, it will never become even a competition to anyone but itself. Right now its only usable for free, adsupported apps thats where it ends.

1000 - 5000 does not get you anywhere, that does not pay a single person on a development team and $0 does not pay anything at all.

You realize that both devices are US only, right?
By the regular turnaround it will take till christmas if not longer until a successor to the Galaxy S, performance wise, exists in europe. (the last generation had nexus one and Xperia x10 as their only devices over here)

Yet the problem is not the devices but that the Ecosystem is flawed and useless at the time and thats googles job to fix and the track of the past 12 months has shown that they are as fast and flexible as a continent shelf while drifting aka perhaps in 12 months they will support buying and selling to a reasonable amount of countries, not just a useless minority that can at best compete with the xbox 360 indie marketplace thats just as crap in that respect

Attempts like Samsungs with their own extended marketplace is something I personally would not support due to the then definite impossibility to do any targeted marketing!

13

Wow, you guys are really negative when it comes to Android.

The No.1 App is Robo Defense with over 250000 sales for 2,99$.
The same goes for Jewellust (2,95$) and Abduction (1,35£)

Not a game, but the newest hit is the PSX Emulator, it came out last Sunday and is already between 10000-50000 downloads for 5,99$.

Fragmentation: Not a problem. In reality there are just two different screen sizes you have to look out for and the different Android revisions (1.6, 2.1 and 2.2). It’s true that it can be a problem,if you try to get out the maximum on a single device or implement special control mechanisms, that rely on Trackball/Keyboard controls, but it isn’t in the sense of in game bugs. I make mobile games since 2004 and it is nowhere as bad as making Java games.

I’ve send out a few Unity tests to a few friends with different handsets and not a single one had a bug (granted, the tests weren’t very complex, I just wanted to show that I work on something).
It got a lot better with Android 2.1 and 2.2.

And once again, Android is not Apple and you are not forced to buy from a single market, you can sell your games through any channel you want, because you are not confined in the Android market.

E.g. Gameloft doesn’t like the market, because their games are all straight Iphone ports, that are ported for the Droid (SGX535) and don’t get updated frequently, that’s why they sell their games exclusively through their website.

There are also alternative markets like SlideMe, MiKandi, AppsLib etc. so you can sell youtr games from wherever you want on all plattforms, even the unsupported ones like tablets.

You wanted a link to those numbers, but these are what I personally witness, since I checked the market every day in the last 6 months. You don’t get exact numbers, you only see if a app has passed a certain amount of downloads.

The categories are
<50
50-100
100-500
500-1000
1000-5000
5000-25000
25000-50000
50000-250000
250000>

Psym Mobile posted numbers for Abduction, 1 million in march and two million in July.

The samsung beam is not a US only device, usually the US get’s Samsung phones after Europe, we’ll see.

And honestly, you guys all sell Iphone games, you should know that no one cares about the sales in East Kazachstan, US sales are the No.1 priority and not a single one of you guys would’ve had the opportunity to sell to the US without the App store. After that comes Europe and no one really cares about the sales amount of the rest in comparison.

I gladly trade the rest of the world against US sales (I’m in Germany btw).

14

To anyone who wants to check how the Android Market is doing, check this site…
http://www.cyrket.com/m/android/
It won’t show you the exact figures, but it gives a range of the potential sales.

Keep telling yourself that over and over and it might just come true. I’ve been in the first rush of mobile apps in the early 2000s, it’s one of the major problems.

Exactly, wait until you get to make complicated ones.

Better yet, what if you come up with an extremely innovative mechanic that requires multi-touch that might just change the face of touch based gaming? It’s just too bad that most of the handsets that you’re trying to target don’t even have this basic feature.

Which is their biggest mistake, buying from one market increases the chance of your apps to be discovered and decreases the confusion for consumers in slogging through various marketplaces.

A lot of people are still uneasy in using their credit cards online, good luck trying to convince them to put theirs on several seedy sites.

15

I recently, like the last few days, read an article that showed a smaller percentage of android users pay for or even download apps than iPhone users. If I recall the percentage of android users who downloaded apps was less than half that of the iPhone users. Paying for them was even worse.

I wish I could find it again. It had figures from adMob and such. I also saw this one:

A higher percentage of android apps are free than iPhone apps.

Until the android platform settles down with all the new androids and the old ones go away I think it will be this way. It also seems to me that the Android market is way more techie, they even sell it as more techie than the iPhone. Just look at the commercials. Android is full of robots and special effects, iPhone is all look how easy and feel good.

16

that more android apps is free is pretty heavily encouraged by the android marketplace because the list of countries where free apps can be downloaded / put on the store is significantly longer than the one of countries from which you can buy apps (13 countries) which is longer than the list of countries from where you can sell them (9 countries).
The current list of countries with any kind of android market access can be found under Supported locations for distribution to Google Play users - Play Console Help and linked in there is the list of countries from which you can sell apps which is otherwise under Supported locations for developer and merchant registration - Play Console Help

Which such a devastating desinterest to allow devs to sell their stuff its clear that apps either will not happen or more likely, will happen ad driven

17

Sorry, but had to throw my 2 cents in now that I took some time with the Android Marketplace. It looks like “Free with Ad support” is King there. Also it was hard for me to find what I wanted unless I knew exactly what game I was looking for. So, for me if someday I just have too much money and free time to make another iPhone game, I will plop down the money for a Android basic (if/when it appears) and spend some time porting and adding ads to my old stuff.

18

I have a few apps on the android market that I made in about a week.

How much am I making? About $200/day over 2 months later.

It’s more than making my living… it’s making 2x as much as my full-time job.

But keep thinking there’s no money here, I’ll keep it to myself.

19

What are the apps? Are they entertainment/games or productivity?

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Entertainment/games. Which is why I’m here for Unity, I’m very interested in being able to put out some of the first high-quality android games (other than the few that exist).